Medical dosage calculations Book

This overview of poetry as a healing art was written by Rafael Campo, a physician and a poet who uses poems with his patients. He does a deep dive into what it means to heal through poetry, looking back culturally. He want to 'resist the idea disease equals self-defeat,' and thus brings us to the work of David Martin, a social anthopoligist who wrote the book "Illness & Culture in the Post Modern Age." "Morris believes that strict reliance on hard science oversimplifies the illness experience; he sees the rise of technology as cold and woefully insufficient for deliverance of the "sick soul" imagined by the likes of Pound, Moore, Stein, & Eliot."

He lays out facts, such as this one found in the "International Journal of Cardiology," "German researches have shown that metrical poetry, when read aloud for 30 minutes, slowed their subjects' pulse rates, as compared to those who engaged in normal conversation for the same period of time. They hypothesize a "Harmonic interaction" between heart rate and respiratory rate, perhaps mediated through neural connections between the language centers in the cerebral cortex and the lower brain structures that govern autonomic nervous system responses, that tends to synchronize these cardiopulmonary functions; as a consequence, blood pressure may drop, allowing tense muscles to relax'singing hymns'cheers'chanting slogans, meditating'rhythmic language helps us breathe more deeply, makes our hearts pound more steadily, and reminds us our heads are joined to ecstatic, flesh and blood bodies."

Or this one, found in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," "Among patients with chronic and debilitating medical conditions such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis, those who wrote creatively about their illness experiences reported fewer symptoms and exhibited less disability than those receiving usual care alone. The result is shocking not solely because modern-day physicians actually through to investigate a hypothesis as humane as one that posited a relationship between creative self-expression and healing but also because they "emotional" or "subjective" (usually so stridently dismissed as impossible to quantify) was quantifiable in these terms. Not just calming the pulse rate, or providing reassuring insight into what it might mean to be sick, but modifying the course of disease. The act of writing here seemed to heal, as the relentless deterioration caused by two very different yet equally complex illnesses was stalled with nothing more than paper and pen, language and imagination."

In chapters labeled: Symptoms, Diagonsis, Treatment, Side Effects, End of Life, or a substitued name for one of his clients, he presents poems and how they work to soothe a patient. He uses poems to make his points from poets like Marilyn Hacker, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, William Carlos Williams, Audre Lorde, Tim Dlugos, Miroslave Holub (another physician poet), Mark Doty, Rika Lesser, Toi Derricotte, Maxine Kumin, are a few. This is a worthwhile book for all doctors to read and think about so they can have better bedside manners and be open to listen to their patients needs.